Editing AVCHD on Macbook

I have a 1rst Gen Macbook (not Pro) that I would like to be able to offload HD video from a yet to be purchased camcorder. I am not so much wanting to put together movies as just get the clips off the flash memory and archived onto an external hard drive and then later onto DVD (either in SD or 720p) for easier viewing and sharing.

I am running OSX 10.4 (tiger) with a 2.0g core duo 2 and 2 GB of RAM. I also have iMovie '08.

Is this doable?

Any help would be appreciated.

Anybody?

I think it will run and edit but it will take time to put together again. For example my MBP takes about 55minutes to process 30 minutes of SDTV. That's with 4GB RAM, 2.53ghz CPU and a 512MB GPU.

The MacBook will be slow but it will do the job. Expect times to be about double mine.